Sunday, May 2, 2010

Oil Spill Disaster - Simulated Drifter Trajectories created by a collaborative effort between the Ocean Circulation Group and the Optical Oceanography Laboratory at College of Marine Science, University of South Florida, and the results are provided as is can be found at http://ocg6.marine.usf.edu/~liu/oil.html

"This is an effort to track the Deepwater Horizon (Macondo well, designated by the red circle) oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico after the oil rig explosion on April 20, 2010. Drifter trajectories were calculated based on the three-hourly surface currents from the West Florida Shelf ROMS hindcastt/forecast system. Particles were released from the sunken rig site every three hours since 05/02/2010 18:00 UTC, assuming continual oil spill from the well. The initial locations of the drifters were taken from satellite remotely sensed oil slick patches at that time. The particles (difters) are shown as black dots, and their trajectries in magenta. Sea surface temperature (color contours, units in deg C) was superimposed with the surface current vectors to indicate the surface ocean circulation. The velocity data were subsampled every the third grid points in both east and north directions for better visulization." Source: http://ocg6.marine.usf.edu/~liu/oil.html